Trump is reported to have called a lot of places ‘shit holes’ and ticked off many people and nations around the world.

After years of building and maintaining a global reach for their economy, culture and military might, the top spot in the dreams and aspirations for people and nations struggling around the world – along comes Donald Trump who erodes it and then spits on it with a shitty comment about shit-hole countries. What a shithead thing to do.

Whether or not he’s Putin’s stooge, he is unilaterally doing much to boost the power and influence of China just as it expands out in to the world.

Why do I say that?

Every country he ticks off, every deal he reneges on gets attention soon afterwards from China. China is making friends and deals in the vacuum Trump leaves behind as he dismantles the Dream of the USA in the minds and hearts of all those who dreamt it out there in the wide world outside the USA.

As more and more dreamers begin to think the USA is not the place they really want to be, and that it doesn’t want them also, one could say they begin to wake up. And once they’ve woken they might find the rose colored glasses they’ve been regarding the USA with are gone. And the USA then becomes just another country . . . maybe special in some ways but not the end all be all they used to think it was.

At some point enough of the cultural trend setters in nations around the world will wake up. And their effect on those who they influence will not be good for the USA.

Already technical schools in India and China are regarded as viable, or desirable, alternatives to American ones by a growing number of bright future scientists, engineers, and intellectuals in many ‘developing’ nations.

Bollywood makes more movies than Hollywood.

China is ramping up to also be major competitors in that game, making ‘hollywood’ movies with American actors and directors in China.

As time moves on more and more bastions of what used to be uniquely American culture will be invaded, or replaced, with products, ideas and art from other countries.

The USA will drop from the Top of the heap down into the ranks of being Just Another Country.

And as it’s influence wanes so might its economic fortunes.

The status and standard of living it promotes require a certain basic minimum amount of economic prosperity. I find it hard to think that a drop in status and influence wouldn’t be reflected in a downward change of economic fortune as well.

What worries me is when the USA gets screwed into a corner economically and begins to find it hard to pay its banker. Or its Bonds. That narrows their options greatly. In bygone times when this happened to monarchs one of the options open, and sometimes taken, is to not pay your banker. And fight them, destroy them, if you have to.

Apparently China is their banker.

Reportedly it owns their debt.

It makes most of what they buy.

But that won’t happen, you say. Saner heads will prevail before it comes to that, you suggest.

But will they? I ask.

They had a tough time for a few years. Courtesy of unrestrained greed in their financial industry. It also roughly coincided with the rise of the Tea Party and a rising wave of distrust of institutions within the USA. And in reaction they elected Donald Trump president. And he’s talking tough and rough and pissing off many people within and without of the USA.

Who will be in control when the whole mess has slid into the dumper and shit hits the fan a few more years down the road?

When faced with intractable politics, and nearly unfixable economics, will that President take some ‘God given right’ tack about the USA getting its own way?

What a pickle.

For all of us.

As we chew on that more dreamers are waking up. Realizing that the fortunes they dreamed of in that far off place called America aren’t going to happen. But maybe they can remake the places they live to be more like where they want to live.

The more of them that wake up the closer we get to that world described above . . .

]]>https://xamble.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/there-was-this-dream/feed/2xambleOD20171122 or Don’t You Just Love Kaleidoscopes?https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/od20171122-or-dont-you-just-love-kaleidoscopes/
https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/11/23/od20171122-or-dont-you-just-love-kaleidoscopes/#respondThu, 23 Nov 2017 08:53:18 +0000http://xamble.wordpress.com/?p=1743optical diversion 20171122 – a little thing I whipped up with Adobe After Effects and Premier. music is 7th Floor Tango by Silent Partner from YouTube’s Free Audio Library.
Press Play and go away for 2 minutes 21 seconds

You suspect (or feel you know) something that you don’t really have a solid basis to ‘know’. A conclusion that your mind has come to all on its own that ‘feels correct’ but you can’t show a logical chain of deduction to arrive at.

Generally we believe that at some level we’ve collected enough data that some part of our mind can make an ‘educated guess’ at an answer to whatever the question might be. What causes something, who did something, why something happened – whatever the question du jour might be.

Well now we find that the web has hunches too . . . and that’s bad for a number of reasons.

A few years back I wrote a one page Christmas story for a community newspaper. In that story the early warning system protecting us from ballistic missile attack is given a way of tapping into the subconscious feelings of the population. A way of listening to the hunches of millions of people in the hopes that this might give it an edge on detecting any sneak attack happening before it gets too real to stop. And in that story the people tasked with being on guard are so close focused on the task at hand that they don’t realize that the missile tracks it shows are actually Santa heading out of the North Pole to millions of sleeping households on Christmas. And we come close to making a terrible mistake.

Recently I read a news article that shows something similar is happening. Sort of.

Here in Canada the news media can be banned from reporting on certain things for periods of time. We’d rather not have voters on the west coast know what voters in the east chose before the west has closed the voting booths. And courts regularly impose bans to protect the innocent from exposure and the trial process from being corrupted. Even after a court case is done the ban may stay in place if it might expose a child / youth victim to unfair public scrutiny.

Apparently that’s now not good enough anymore.

If enough people suspect someone of being involved and they go to their favorite search engine and type that person’s name and the crime into the search box then the search algorithm will take that into account in the results it provides to later searchers. And those search results will then show the crime reports in the search results for that person’s name.

Let’s say there’s a child molestation case involving a primary school. A popular teacher is being charged with sexual interference with a number of children. Let’s say their name is X. Because of the children the court will ban reporting X’s name and possibly the name of the school as well.

Let’s say the news story breaks on the weekend, a Saturday. Only those directly involved know the particulars. Some parents might tell other parents, friends and relatives what they know but they aren’t media outlets publishing anything that violates the ban. But word gets around and curious people more removed from the case are getting rumors. And being curious they go to the web to find out more.

Initially a search of X’s name alone won’t yield results that link to the crime but by Monday a lot of people are searching for news reports using the crime and X’s name. After many thousands of searches like that the search engine has noticed that these two items are linked together. So by the end of the week someone searching using just X’s name will see reports of the crime appearing in the result lists. Even though none of the news reports linked to will not have X’s name anywhere in them.

The news report I read regarding this comes from the Ottawa Citizen. There’s a follow up from a few days later.

As the report points out the same linkage can also take place for the names of victims if enough search attempts linking them are fed into the search engine.

Whether this is a fixable problem is debatable. In Europe they forced Google to alter it’s search results to ‘forget’ about someone’s past. There are other ramifications as well . . .

There is a small industry out there that makes a living helping people recover their ‘good name’ after some reputational damage.

Let’s say you were X in the above case. Furthermore let’s say you were found to be innocent but because you had been charged and the search engines are associating your name with the case your reputation is damaged badly. What can you do?

If you can afford it you can hire one these firms to help repair that. They will go through a process of flooding the web with ‘good things’ about you. Eventually these instances of good will push the instances of bad way down the list of results so that they won’t appear in the first few pages. And since most people don’t keep digging past page 3 or 4 that works more or less.

It’s almost the same process that put X’s name in the results to begin with but in reverse. Then again if you wanted to destroy someone that same process can be used to damage a reputation as well. The more well known the target the more likely that salacious, speculative, rumors will result in this kind of damage. New tech makes for new opportunities and not all of them are desirable.

“Sir! We have an unidentified track coming out of the north!” The sudden voice jarred Royce back from his day dream.

“What’s that Lieutenant?” he shot back. “Clarify!”

“Sir! The M-Scan system ‘is showing an unidentified track rising from north of the Arctic Circle.”

Around the room, worried eyes looked back and forth between Captain Royce and their work station screens.

“No – make that two – now it’s four!” the kid was sounding frightened.

“Sarge! Bump up the threat sign one level. Get me SAC on the horn.” Royce turned around and called to a young woman two aisles over: “Crandall!

“Not a thing sir!” was her reply.

Royce shot back with, “Get some self tests going and check with the Individual DEW Line stations while that’s happening!” He turned back to the M-Scan station and gave Lieutenant Murphy, who was watching him instead of his screens, a questioning look. The Lieutenant swung his gaze back and Royce watched as his jaw dropped.

“What’s the problem Murphy?” Murphy’s jaw was working but nothing was coming out.

“Spit it out son! What do you see?” Royce was almost out of his chair when Murphy finally shouted back: “Dozens sir! Hundreds of tracks! They’re heading all over… and they’re all coming from the same polar area! What are they?” the fright was clear in his voice.

“Radar?” Royce called. “Nothing Sir!” came the reply.

“Space! What are our birds telling you?” He asked the noncom who was running the Near Space Threat Detection System. “Nothing sir! was the answer.

“Sir! SAC’s on the line for you. General Thornby.”

“General we have a rapidly developing situation here.”

Royce cupped the mouthpiece and yelled to the Sergeant “Bump Threat up one more level, Sarge!”

“What’s happening, Captain Royce?” the General was brisk. “We have no threat indicators at our end…”

“That’s the system that taps into the ‘interplants’, isn’t it?” the General asked.

“Yes sir. It uses anticipated event analysis to poll the interweb implants in people’s heads. It’s regarded as being an extra level of security for threats that the big hardware can’t pick-up on but that people sense is there.”

“And it’s seeing multiple tracks leading out of the North Pole?”

Royce shot a questioning look at the M-Scan station.

The Lieutenant gave a ‘hands lifted shrug’ and mouthed ‘Thousands’.

“It’s in the thousands now sir. And they’re heading out across the globe.”

“Not just at us?” the General asked.

“No Sir! Everywhere.”

“And this is coming from a system that taps into the expectations of events in the minds of the population?”

‘That’s right, Sir.

Royce turned away to tell the Sergeant to bump Threat level up again. When he turned back he could hear chuckling coming from the receiver.

“Sir?” he asked. “ls there some joke here we aren’t aware of? ls this a training exercise? Why weren’t we told!” he was getting annoyed.

“What day is this Captain?” was the General’s response.

“Day 4 of an 8 day rotation, Sir!” Royce answered.

“No son, not the shift. The date. The real date.” the General prompted.

Royce had to look at the calendar. “December 24th Sir. No – check that – it’s the 25th now, Sir.” He answered and waited.

“That’s right Captain. And the M-scanner is seeing the anticipation of many people, most of them children I expect, thinking about Santa traveling from the North Pole to their house with a sack of gifts.”

“So, we shouldn’t try to shoot it down then?” Royce was feeling really stupid.

“No – I think that would be a bad idea son.”

“OK, Sir. I’m feeling a bit silly now.” He apologized.

“No need to son – this is the first year that M-Scan has been in place. No one foresaw this… now you enjoy your Christmas, son. Merry Christmas to everyone on watch.”

“Yes sir. And a Merry Christmas to you too, Sir!”

(originally published in the Boundary Communicator Dec 2010)

]]>https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/11/22/on-watch/feed/0xambleon_watch_story_bannerCould an AI be the keeper of extinguishing languages?https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/11/01/could-an-ai-be-the-keeper-of-extinguishing-languages/
https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/11/01/could-an-ai-be-the-keeper-of-extinguishing-languages/#respondThu, 02 Nov 2017 06:49:53 +0000http://xamble.wordpress.com/?p=1702Continue reading →]]>Watching a news item about a movie being made in an indigenous setting using indigenous actors speaking the language of their past ancestors. The actors all had to get a language boot camp and still learn how to pronounce the words from the script because none of them speak it. Only about 12 people in the world still speak it – they are all elders and those factors make resurrecting the language extra complicated.

I’ve seen this with other languages at other times – once the speakers are dead and gone the language is likely gone as well.

Even if some lingual genius were to learn these languages that would stave off extinction by one lifetime.

But what if an Artificial Intelligence were to take on the role of learning and using a dying language?

An AI might be able to acquire a new spoken language faster than the average human. And, potentially, it is more easily deploy-able to different places in the world at the same time.

If the AI was able to converse in the new language then that would mean that even after the last native speaker of that language had died there would still be ‘some-one/thing’ that researchers, teachers, students and the curious could converse with. And being able to hold conversations with someone is much better than the instead. Instead of just consuming media and mimicking content.

If this doesn’t already exist it will be possible anytime now. I’m writing this in the fall of 2017 and in the not so distant past a change took place that accelerated machine learning of human language (deep learning and sequence-to-sequence learning). You can read more about that in this article in a series over at medium.com.

That article is about languages that have a written form – not all do. I am not a linguist but I suspect that many human languages have been spoken only. So an easily used interface that an elderly, computer agnostic / illiterate, individual could operate would be ideal. Possibly a human-like robot designed styled to be non-threatening, say with a child-like size and appearance. That would help create the right psychological (and possibly emotional) mental state in the elderly person ‘teaching’ the bot their language. It leads them into a parental or grand parent role which might help get their emotional ‘buy in’ of the process. One could say that the little bot is standing in for all the children in the future who might learn the language being passed down.

It’s a shame when a culture or language disappears from the world of man. It’s as if the efforts of all those who contributed to its development over the decades and centuries were ultimately lost to time. And the real shame is it doesn’t have to be that way.

When I was a child I thought it meant you had a tin ear – that it meant you couldn’t hear or differentiate musical tones the way most people could. I’ve since learned that’s not what it means.

What it means to me is that there is a background noise to my life that never goes away completely. Right now as I sit here there’s an air cleaner running quietly in the room, a TV going in the other room, the occasional car or truck passing by outside and every now and then the air conditioner turns on.. But mixed in with that is a hiss; it has a slight;y high pitched edge dancing on top but most of the time it’s a hiss.

The way I describe it most of the time is to say ‘It’s like there’s a water tap running in a bathroom elsewhere in the house.’ Sometimes it gets louder and becomes a ringing in my ears. Most of the time I forget it’s there – the real world is too noisily busy to notice it. But it never ever goes away completely.

When I first moved out on my own I found myself always listening to either the radio or music when I went to sleep (all night TV wasn’t a thing back then and VHS hadn’t been invented let alone DVDs or steaming media). I later learned that nearly all people with tinnitus do the same. It’s because when the real world gets really quiet the internal noise becomes all that much more noticeable.

People with severe symptoms can find their ability to carry on a normal life badly disrupted. Effects can range from simply being debilitating to driving people insane. Thankfully mine is not that bad – I can carry on a fairly normal life and it doesn’t prevent me from enjoying it for the most part.

I wasn’t born with it, I think.
I’m pretty sure mine comes from noise-induced hearing loss. And I know exactly how it happened because I did it to myself – at the time I was only 8 and had no idea I was destroying my hearing and setting off structural changes in my head. I was just doing what 8 year olds do, exploring the limits of my world.

Long story short: I subjected my ears to an extremely loud horn pushed up nice and tight because there was a slight tickling sensation at the loudest point. For two days all I could hear was a loud screaming ringing in my ears – I bluffed my way through those days and didn’t let on I couldn’t hear a thing. Eventually the ringing died off and the hearing came back. The ringing sound never completely went away though . . . and the hearing probably never completely came back either. C’est la vie . . . enough about me.

Medical science knows that tinnitus comes from damage to the hearing system but beyond that little is known. There has been no external way to verify someone has it for instance. Other than their own testimonials there was no test that could be done to differentiate those with the condition from those without it.

Until now that is.

A team headed by Fatima Husain, University of Illinois speech and hearing science and neuroscience professor, has been conducting research using Functional MRI imaging and has shown changes in how the brains of tinnitus patients work when compared to those without it.

In the first I’ll mention she was “trying to understand how the brain adapts to having tinnitus for a very long time”. I’ve had it for over 50 years so I think I’d be in that cohort.

What did her team do? “Using fMRI, Husain’s team previously compared how the brain processes emotion in patients with mild tinnitus and people without the condition”

What did it find? ” … in contrast to those without tinnitus, patients with mild tinnitus showed greater engagement of different areas in the brain when processing emotional sounds.”Okay, what about patients with not so mild tinnitus? “To further understand this altered brain activation, Husain conducted a new fMRI study to see if there were any differences among tinnitus patients. Because some patients adjust to the ringing in the ears while others do not, the severity of the condition can vary greatly.” I think I’ve been able to have a life not greatly affected by the condition.

What does that mean? “Patients with lower tinnitus distress used an altered pathway to process emotional information. The path did not rely on the amygdala, commonly believed to play an important role in emotion processing in the brain. Instead, patients who had adapted to their tinnitus symptoms used more of the brain’s frontal lobe, a region critical for attention, planning and impulse control. The researchers suggested that the greater activation of the frontal lobe might be helping to control emotional responses and reduce tinnitus distress.”

So does that mean that the brains of most of you (readers without this condition) use the one of the oldest parts of your brains’ architecture, the amygdala , to process the emotional content of stimulae but I do not? That my condition has disrupted the utility of that resource and forced my brain to enlist capacity in the most recently developed part of the brain, the frontal lobes?

Hmm . . . all kinds of questions arise here.What is causing this break in the connection to, or usability of , the amygdala?How does this drafting of portions of the frontal lobe for this task affect the other activities of the frontal lobe?
In what way do I, and other low stress tinnitus patients, process emotional content differently from you who do not have the condition?
The Amygdala is also central to memory. If tinnitus affected using it for one function how has it altered use of this aspect of it’s function? Do I remember things in a mechanistically different way than you?

“Using functional MRI to look for patterns across brain function and structure, the new study found that tinnitus is, in fact, in the hearers’ heads — in a region of the brain called the precuneus, to be precise.
The precuneus is connected to two inversely related networks in the brain: the dorsal attention network, which is active when something holds a person’s attention; and the default mode network, which are the “background” functions of the brain when the person is at rest and not thinking of anything in particular.
. . . The researchers found that, in patients with chronic tinnitus, the precuneus is more connected to the dorsal attention network and less connected to the default mode network. Additionally, as severity of the tinnitus increased, so did the observed effects on the neural networks.
. . . It also implies that tinnitus patients are not truly at rest, even when resting. This could explain why many report being tired more often. Additionally, their attention may be engaged more with their tinnitus than necessary, and that may lessen their attention to other things. If you have bothersome tinnitus, this may be why you have concentration issues”

I just learned of the Default Mode Network this past year and the ramifications of it are still percolating through my mind. And now I find that it’s maybe not being used as much (or in the same way) as it is in ‘normal’ people. Well geeee whiz – now I’m more curious than ever about it.

For those who haven’t heard about the Default Mode Network it’s another thing that was suspected for a long time but actual verification was discovered after researchers began using fMRI to peek inside operating brains.

Ever since Hans Berger invented the EEG and noticed constant electrical activity there has been a suspicion that the brain is always working no matter how rested or inactive the person appears. Later research showed that some areas of the frontal lobe became less active during focused thought. And that there was only a 5% difference in metabolic activity between resting and fully engaged brains. But it took fMRI to actually see the various parts of the brain firing in bouts of interrelated activity while a person wasn’t actually consciously thinking of anything at all.

All in all my first take-away from all of this news if I sure am happy that brain function is so dam plastic. If it wasn’t then the mal-connect with my amygdala caused by my tinnitus might have left me seriously damaged in some fundamental and debilitating way. The fact that another part of the brain can be repurposed to perform the job the system cannot use the amygdala for is part of that plasticity. That it’s affect on the normal functioning of that part of the brain is not noticeable to myself or others in any way can also be credited to that same plasticity.

Another title for this could have been ‘Brain Plasticity Protects Against Dumb Choices’

In this CBC article “U.S. punishes American firm after its Canadian subsidiary leases cars to Cuban embassy in Ottawa” a number of pitfalls are pointed at.

The gist of the article is that a Canadian subsidiary of American Honda Finance Company leased 13 vehicles to the Cuban embassy in Ottawa. The US government has regulations that forbid US firms from dealing with Cuba and they have fined the American parent company $89K in response.

Even though it’s a Canadian company doing business in Canada it is a subsidiary of an American company being held to American law which the US government feels it has a right to do. Some think this is “interference with a Canadian business transaction.”

How about Canadian companies doing business in or with Cuban companies?

It’s complicated.

From the text of the article:

“in 1992 Canada enacted the Foreign Extraterritorial Measures (United States) Order, which was passed in response to the passage of the Cuba Democracy Act in Washington the same year.

The order requires any Canadian company that is contacted by U.S. authorities responsible for enforcing sanctions to notify the Canadian federal government. The order also bars Canadian companies from complying with any U.S. law that seeks to limit their business dealings with Cuba.

A Canadian businessman who pays a fine such as the one levied on Honda could face five years in a Canadian prison as a result.”

So what’s a Canadian business to do: comply with Canadian law or American law?

Let’s say you are a Canadian business person who wants to comply with Canadian law but also desires to do business in Cuba. If you have business interests in the US then you have exposure – the US government could retaliate by punishing those businesses directly. If you don’t then you have to only worry about what might happen if you find yourself visiting the USA because if they find your violation serious enough in their eyes then you could be arrested and detained until they decide what to do with you.

Situations like this are part of the power of the US embargo. It keeps businesses afraid of doing business with Cuba.

It gets worse though . . .

“One new prohibition in the measures announced by Trump in Florida Friday could have particular consequences for Canadian companies that have U.S. affiliates or U.S. ownership.

They specifically prohibit all business dealings with businesses owned by the Cuban Armed Forces.

… many of the island’s hotels are majority-owned by the Cuban military …

Consequently, almost any foreign company involved in Cuban tourism is likely to have dealings with the Cuban military’s enterprise group, GAESA, or one of its holding companies, such as the Gaviota Group.

… Gaviota works with numerous Canadian entities, including Sunwing Vacations, Air Canada Vacations and Transat Holidays.”

Those last three companies are subsidiaries of Canadian airline companies.

What’s the worstthat could happen?

Let’s say the US government tells those companies to stop what they are doing – cease arranging vacations for Canadians (and anyone else) in those Cuban hotels. And let’s say that they try to comply with the Canadian law that counters that.

The US could theoretically impound every Sunwing, Air Canada and Transat airliner that finds itself on a tarmac within the USA. Passengers would be left to find their own way home because employees of said companies could also be detained and prevented from doing their jobs. That would be disaster for those companies and disaster for US/Canada relations.

Potentially flights from Canada to Mexico and points south would have to circumvent US airspace because if they found themselves within the territory of the USA they could be forced to land at a US airstrip and face legal measures.

Think I’m being alarmist?

This New York Times article ) from 1996 tells the tale of a Canadian mining company doing business in Cuba and the legal issues it faced. The US government warned that non-compliance meant that executives, and their families, would be barred from entry into the US if the firm did not comply. This same threat was posed to executives from telephone companies in Mexico and Italy.

This was the Helms-Burton law and it was enacted under Bill Clinton. For more info here is the Wikipedia article on the Helms-Burton Act.

The first point is “International Sanctions against the Cuban Government. Economic embargo, any non-U.S. company that deals economically with Cuba can be subjected to legal action and that company’s leadership can be barred from entry into the United States. Sanctions may be applied to non-U.S. companies trading with Cuba. This means that internationally operating companies have to choose between Cuba and the U.S., which is a much larger market.”

Now I still to do more research on the history of application of the Helms-Burton act over the past two decades to find more useful information. But my inner Cassandra is having a field day with this because Trump has added this twist about doing business with the Cuban Military and, like the Egyptian and other militaries around the dictatorial world, they have their fingers in many of their country’s economic pies.

]]>https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/06/18/canada-cuba-us-business-hazards/feed/0xambleWells Fargo Banksters At It Againhttps://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/wells-fargo-banksters-at-it-again/
https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/wells-fargo-banksters-at-it-again/#respondFri, 16 Jun 2017 18:09:47 +0000http://xamble.wordpress.com/?p=1457Continue reading →]]>Wells Fargo has had its hands slapped in the recent past for doing things to its customers without their knowledge or consent. In that case they were signing customers up for credit cards and then taking them away – ostensibly to meet sales quotas. Apparently a Virtual sale is as good as a real one when it comes to meeting short term quota goals. They were fined $185 million for that. The CEO lost his position.

Now they have been accused of making changes to the mortgage terms of some customers without asking their permission. It’s laid out in this New York Times article.

The customers in question all have on thing in common: they are facing bankruptcy.

The rejigging always works the same way: The term of the mortgage is extended to something like 40 years which brings the monthly payment down. It also increases the total interest owed over the term of the mortgage by tens of thousands of dollars.

The bank is contending it did nothing wrong, that it notified the customers of the change. Customers are saying no notice was given.

Some might thing that having the monthly payment drop from just over $1000 to the mid $600s sounds like a good deal. Especially when you’re facing bankruptcy.

There are problems with that though. When you go into the process you have to disclose all your financial incomes and outgoings to the court. If you begin making these new, lower, payments without the court’s permission you could come out of the bankruptcy owing the difference between the payments. The added interest of extending your mortgage term from 10 years to 40 years amounts to tens of thousands of dollars. That would put you into an arrears situation and the bank could immediately begin foreclosure proceedings against your house.

When I initially read this last night (different article on different news site) that last part wasn’t mentioned. I theorized another possible reason for this behaviour.

When you do finally go bankrupt the court looks at who you owe money to in order to determine who gets what. These entities are divided into two categories: the secured and the unsecured creditors.

The secured creditors get paid out first and then, if anything is left over, the unsecured get paid.

So when it comes to the secured creditors how would the court / trustee decide who gets what portion of your financial carcass? Well they would likely add up the financial commitments owed and take the ratio of that amount represented by an individual vulture, er – creditor, and assign them that amount.

Imagine someone had a house, car or two, RV, boat, cabin in the woods that they owed on. If you’re Wells Fargo and the house is your stake in this then by boosting the total amount owed on that property you would also boost the ratio of the total debt and give you a bigger piece of the carcass.

Now I’m not a banker and have never worked for a bank. Nor a credit institution or a court. Haven’t gone through bankruptcy myself. So I cannot honestly say that this would be the case. I just have a Cassandra somewhere in my head that comes up with these worst case scenarios without prompting.

This recently exposed activity happened in the 2015/2016 period. It might have gone on a bit before but the class action suit lists only 25 customers so far. So it could be argued that this all happened under the tenure of the previous administrative regime.

I’ve heard that Wells Fargo is a $270 Billion entity. Their last fine was less than 1/10th of one percent of that amount. I would imagine that it does cause some painful consternation to some degree . . . but was that enough pain to cause the bank to change its practices?

They don’t think too highly of Wells Fargo at occupy.com and with good reason. Just type Wells Fargo into their search box to find articles like this one.

]]>https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/06/16/wells-fargo-banksters-at-it-again/feed/0wellsfargo-nybz130-ap-1024x561xambleHeLa might be a double edged weaponhttps://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/hela-might-be-a-double-edged-weapon/
https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/hela-might-be-a-double-edged-weapon/#respondSun, 30 Apr 2017 08:53:25 +0000http://xamble.wordpress.com/?p=1336Continue reading →]]>In the last year or so I’ve heard a number of stories that just tonight became connected by a volunteer process somewhere in the back of my mind.

HeLa is the one I’ve heard most of.

For those who don’t know HeLa is the shortened version of the name Henrietta Lacks. She is extremely important to medical science. Even though she has been technically deceased for over 50 years I use ‘is’ because her cells live on today. And in many places they perform a valuable service: a consistent set of human cells on which to perform tests and experiments necessary for research and development. This is likely to go on pretty much forever so long after you and I have passed on HeLa will exist.

Early in the 20th century Medical Science began searching for human cells that could live in laboratory conditions, outside the body, and be grown outside the body. This search took tissue samples from many people and then tested them to see if they could survive outside the body. After decades of trying they finally tested cells from Henrietta at Johns Hopkins in 1951 and found what they were looking for.

Since then they’ve learned how to grow other cell lines but HeLa has proved to be the most successful.

In 1962 it was discovered that it was hardy enough to survive being an aerosol particle. It could aerosolize, float around, and by 1966 we knew it could land on cells being grown in other labs and not only survive but reproduce and sometimes take over.

The other story that popped up in my head while listening to that was the plight of the Tasmanian Devils.

The population of Tasmanian Devils is being decimated by a pernicious disease. It’s a Cancer that manifests as tumorous growths on and in the animal’s snout hence the moniker: devil facial tumour disease DFTD (wikipedia, U of Cambridge Transmissible Cancer Group,

Tasmanian Devils engage in social discourse and as part of that they bite. This becomes a transfer mechanism for cancerous cells to move from one animal to another.

The scary thing is that these cells can then grow and proliferate and form a tumour. Even though they are not genetically ‘self’ to the new animal it doesn’t matter. For some reason still not completely understood they are able to withstand, or mitigate, the host’s immune response. Major Histocompatibility Complex Class 1 molecules on the cell surface are the main way cells are identified as being self or not self. DFTD cancer cells limit the expression of these MHC1 molecules and that can help them hide from the immune system. They are Cancer cells and they are Immortal: in the simple sense that as long as they are attached to a living Devil they will never die.

This is a Transmissible Cancer. Research has identified a second transmissible cancer involved with the Devils so now they are called DFT1 and DFT2.

In case you haven’t figured out where I’m going with this:

Some Cancers are transmissible.

HeLa cells are derived from human Cancer cells.

HeLa cells are very hardy, enough to become aerosols

HeLa cells can take over the growth environment they land in

Which leaves me wondering how often a DNA fingerprint of cancer biopsies happens. A visual inspection might be enough to tell if cells are cancerous or not but does anyone go past that point? What would be the point of that – the cancer in that person’s body, lungs must be cells from that person. Right?

Some things to consider:

In the Readers Guide on RebeccaSkloot.com there is mention of ‘Chester Southam begins to conduct experiments without patient consent to see whether or not injections of HeLa cells could cause cancer in 1954’ which leaves me wondering what and where the HeLa cells were injected into.

In this ScienceAlert article they talk of 8 different types of contagious cancer. 1 in dogs, 2 in the devils and 5 in 4 species of molluscs and their relatives. Not only that but we now know of cancer that can be passed between species. These are close relatives genetically speaking but they are different species none the less.

I winder whether anyone has thought to do studies of lab workers who have worked with or near HeLa cells and gone on to develop lung cancer later on.

UPDATE:

I did some searching on Chester Southam and Cancer. The story is disturbing.

Depending on which road you take to get to it he could be (and was) likened to World War 2 Nazi doctors conducting experiments on humans without their knowledge or consent (NYPost) . Or he could be looked at as a research doctor willing to do the things necessary to ensure he and others weren’t doing major harm to patients. (HelATerm)

In the opening words of that second link we hear: “Chester Southam, a virologist, wanted to be sure that the cancer in the HeLa cells, which he and other doctors were using for tests, were not contagious. At this time in history, cancer was still a mystery. He assumed there was a valid risk of causing cancer, and as a cancer researcher, he wanted to know for sure (Skloot, 2010, p. 131)”

He began by injecting HeLa cancer cells into patients who already had cancer. In some they developed into tumours that subsequently disappeared. In others the tumours did not disappear but were surgically removed. One patient died from a HeLa cancer. So a HeLa cancer in a host IS a definite, proven, possibility.

Not sure if this was due to their already compromised systems he moved on to injecting HeLa cells into healthy prison inmates. In each case tumours began to grow but the immune system was able to fend them off.

He carried on with studies of this sort with various patients in a number of institutions. Most of the time they had no idea what was being done to them.

He also did testing with other diseases on people in Africa.

In regards to the central question of this post it’s clear that HeLa cells can cause Cancer in foreign (Not Henrietta Lacks) hosts. Whether or not this is a serious problem is down to other factors. Now about those lung cancers . . .

]]>https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/hela-might-be-a-double-edged-weapon/feed/0xambleCaveat Emptorhttps://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/04/29/caveat-emptor/
https://xamble.wordpress.com/2017/04/29/caveat-emptor/#respondSat, 29 Apr 2017 17:02:38 +0000http://xamble.wordpress.com/?p=1323Continue reading →]]>Today I heard reference once again to ’25,000 peer reviewed studies’. This was in a discussion about micro-cell installations and EMF.

I’ve heard this phrase bandied about before in the same context and almost always by opponents of cellphone and WiFi technology. Maybe opponents is too broad – these are people worried about negative health effects of the radiated energy from these technologies.

And even though I’d been through these arguments before I wanted a refresh . . . so I asked Google to find me everything on ‘25000 peer reviewed studies’. I figured I’d find a rich vein of discussions on this topic. But that’s not actually what I got back . . .

Another one on Digital Publishing referring to the 20 to 25 thousand peer reviewed journals out there. Actually more than one listing appeared to be referring to 25,000 as a common estimate of the number of peer reviewed journals there are.

It wasn’t until the 4th page of results that I came across something clearly related to the EMF concerns about cell/wireless technology and that was for a company pitching pseudo-science products to the fearful. Wooooo . . .

So I went back and put quotes around my search terms so Google would rank pages with the exact phrase higher and sure enough there were links to pages related to this topic first in the 3 pages of results. But on the first page I also found links to the argument over Cannabis and Diets. On the second I find links to a fight against a tax on Tanning beds, a ‘Within Person Approach to Job Performance’,

So I suspect that the ’25,000 peer reviewed studies’ statistic is BOGUS. That it was harvested from the blue sky by someone wanting a big number to back up their possibly specious claims. Their thinking process might have gone something like this: We don’t know exactly how many studies have been done but if there was even one study in each of the peer reviewed journals out there that might be a lot. So how many journals are there? About 25,000. So we could speculate that there might be 25,000 studies then couldn’t we?

And while there might be a lot of these studies I don’t think 25,000 is the correct number. But I think pseudo studies by people who think like that are definitely on the rise. As are pseudo scientific journals to cater to them.

Which is the really sad part.

People with an attitude that says studies that are done to backstop ‘ideas we all know are true because they must be’ are science are polluting the world with crap and unscrupulous people are making a buck off them. And fearful, unsuspecting people are taking all this as fuel to feed their fears and ammunition to force fear-based changes on the rest of the world.

For this reason I’m adding the phrase ’25,000 peer reviewed studies’ to my BS detector. So that if I see that used by someone I’ll automatically put their words on extra special scrutiny and regard them and their causes with extra suspicion.

25,000 studies with fear on the web,
25,000 studies with fear
If one gets debunked that’s okay and alright
‘cuz there’s 24,999 studies of fear on the web
24,999 studies with fear on the web,
24,999 studies with fear
debunk another and two pop up in its place
25,000 studies with fear on the web,
25,000 studies with fear.